CeMAT grows by leaps and bounds - attendance up over 20 percent

Driven by globalization, the intralogistics sector is experiencing growth rates virtually unmatched by any other sector, and CeMAT - the world's leading intralogistics showcase - is growing just as fast.

Some 58,500 trade visitors from around the world attended CeMAT, with around 36 percent of them coming from outside Germany.

Sepp D. Heckmann, Chairman of the Managing Board at Deutsche Messe, was delighted with the run of the show: "Intralogistics is an enormously dynamic sector, and a global industry. CeMAT gives our exhibitors exactly the platform they need to present their new products and innovations to an international audience. The huge turnout by visitors from abroad was sensational - an outstanding validation of Hannover's status as a leading trade fair venue."

Satisfaction ran high among the show's more than 1,100 exhibitors from 35 different countries (up from 980 at the previous CeMAT staging in 2005). In the words of Klaus Tersteegen, member of the Board of Management at SSI Schäfer, Neunkirchen: "CeMAT 2008 was a success for us overall, and we were very pleased at the results. There have been plenty of promising talks with customers, and our showcase came across as worthy of the market leaders, impressing customers, staff and journalists alike. We already have high expectations for the next CeMAT."

Christoph Hahn-Woernle, spokesman for the Intralogistics Forum in the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) and Managing Partner at viastore systems GmbH, Stuttgart, saw CeMAT 2008 as a clear reflection of the ongoing upswing in the intralogistics industry: "Intralogistics has notched up impressively since CeMAT 2005, growing by more than 25 percent to a volume of 18.5 billion euros. That is a solid performance by anyone's standards, and demonstrates the huge potential of our dynamic industry, particularly compared with the economy as a whole."